Drupal® For Dummies®, 2nd Edition

Chapter 3

Essential Administration

In This Chapter

• Deciding where to begin
• Getting in and editing your account
• Creating basic content
• Becoming comfortable with Drupal terminology
• Configuring Drupal

After you install Drupal, you're ready for some less painful but equally essential tasks to get your site into shape. This chapter is fun — honest! You get to dive in and start shaping your website. You make changes and immediately get to see the results of those changes.

We cover some of the nitty gritty Drupal configuration settings that you need to know. We also introduce Drupalese — that is, we go over some of the language that Drupal uses and explain what it means in nontechnical terms. This is especially important because these terms are used frequently in the rest of the chapters. Understand them here, and you won't be in the dark later. Sound good? Of course it does. Let's get down to work!

Setting a Strategy for Your Drupal Site

It's never too early to think about the purpose of your site. In our case, we created the drupalfordummies.com site to support this book and give readers a place to discuss information in the book and Drupal in general. One of our goals for the site was to help create a sense of community.

In this chapter, when you see screen shots of drupalfordummies.com, they are early ones, taken when the site was first being put together. We were still considering the site configuration options that Drupal 7 offers and which choices made the most sense for this ...